


Yes, Virginia

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-19
Updated: 2008-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:55:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1625387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ned and Verity's first Christmas, with an earthly chorus of Scandinavians, scientists and sheep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yes, Virginia

**Author's Note:**

> To Nos and Epigone, who vanquished dangling modifers: thank you. To the people of my Oxford: two years running, and I'm sorry. And to the beloved human who was kept up at night by this story: just, love.
> 
> Written for silk_knickers

 

 

Snow had fallen overnight, leaving the front quad with its traditional icing-sugar coating, and the world was muffled, soft edged, still. I was holding a gilt-edged envelope and pondering the logistics of tramping home through the cold when the kerfuffle started outside. I suppose Balliol under virgin snow is sufficiently unusual that the porters wish to keep it that way; at any rate, that seemed the rationale for dragging Ned off the grass by the ear. The frog-march back to the lodge quite blurred his long line of seraphim and cherubim.

"Mr. Henry," said Ian, head porter and all-round nice chap, cheerful and draconian, "what on earth do you think you are doing?"

"Er," I said at this point, running out of the post room, "er. He's, er."

"Ms. Kindle, are you responsible for this atrocity?"

I wasn't sure if he meant the snow angels or Ned. "Er, in a manner of speaking. Er. Look, he's, he's not well. I'll deal with it."

Ian looked dubious; in the winter sunshine coming through the lodge main doors, Ned resembled the half-demented undead, and he was gibbering a bit as I took him carefully from Ian's measured ear-pinch grip. "What light through yonder window breaks?" he demanded as I did it, and could feel Ian's hard stare on our backs as I led him out onto the Broad.

"Really, Ned, that's not even original oversentimentality. It's the light through the library windows and you know it."

"Ah, winter," he said, "the world replete with sharp-edged rejuvenation, the trees, snow-encrusted, the powdery crystal flakes..."

The one blessing of people with time-lag, I suppose, is that they are very easy to tune out; once you've heard one babbling historian you've heard them all, and Ned was only muttering to himself very quietly as I steered him across the cobbles. At this time of the morning, the city was quiet. There was the occasional sleepy undergraduate trudging through the drifts to a tutorial, and the sounds of shutters rising as the small cafes and sandwich shops opened up for the day. I stopped in one, shook my boots and warmed my hands, and bought a couple of raspberry flapjacks. I was just feeding one of them to Ned when someone called, "Verity!" from the shadows beneath Mary Magdalene.

"Mr. Dunworthy," I said, feeling rather ineffectual as he crossed. "Er, good morning."

"And to you, although I suspect from your general demeanour that it may be anything but a good morning."

I kicked Ned surreptitiously on the ankle, but it did no good; "Like the first morning!" he declaimed, and went back to muttering under his breath.

"Difficulty Distinguishing Sounds?" Mr. Dunworthy suggested, looking like he was trying very hard not to smile.

"And all the rest of it," I said. "I let him out of my sight for a moment and then found him making snow angels in Balliol's front quad."

"Ah." This time he definitely looked amused, and I shrugged. The sunlight, I noted absently, was falling very prettily around his face and hair -- like a halo, or a divine glow as in sagas of old -- and then shuddered. Clearly Ned was catching.

"How is the project?" Mr. Dunworthy asked, after a pause. Above him, the south-facing clock face was still stuck on five past five, as it had been for the previous hundred years. I was starting to gain a visceral understanding of what that felt like.

"It's the same." I took a quick glance around me before going on. "We've been doing this for -- what's the date today, the sixteenth -- three months, just about. And now we're well into December on this side of the net and absolutely nothing has happened. Night after night, sitting there with that dratted fibreglass sheep and never enough blankets."

"December on this side of the net?" Mr. Dunworthy repeated. "Is it not...."

"No," I said, having had to explain this part several times before, "we're not sure when it is exactly, but it's certainly not December. The shepherds watched their sheep by night, you recall? They were out there because it was lambing season, which puts it around March or April, by my reckoning. It's immaterial, of course, as long as we have got the time right, and I'm beginning to suspect we haven't."

"Don't fret, my dear," he said, and gave me a pat on the shoulder. (The effect was ruined somewhat by Ned almost falling over his own feet.) "I take it you're having a small holiday at the moment?"

"Sort of." I waved vaguely at Ned, and at the snow, and at Oxford in general. "Ned's not, well, he's not _well_ , and I'm tired, and we ought to be doing three weeks in four but we've just been so exhausted, and, just..."

He held up a hand. "Say no more. Do try and reach home safely, if you can, and get some rest before I see you in college again."

I nodded, as cheered as always by his kindness, and continued on the task of getting Ned up the black ice on St Giles. It was slow going, and I stopped at the delicatessen on the way up, bought some mozzarella, sundried tomatoes and a coconut, and turned in under the fading street lights towards Jericho. 

Our house is a little one off on Observatory Street, more of a flat than a house -- we have the ground floor of an old Victorian confection, painted a gentle pink with pansy-bedecked windowboxes all the way up -- and I let us in after some fumbling with keys. Penwiper mewed and came scampering up to meet us; as is normal after three weeks away, she was bigger. I scooped her up with one hand, pushed Ned towards the bathroom with the other -- he seemed to manage this with more than the expected alacrity -- and set to straightening the bedsheets and pillows, opening the windows to give the place a brief airing, and struggling with the kitten's desire to embrace my feet at every step. Ned reappeared, muttered something about faithful woman's faithful friend, and fell on top of the sheets. I manhandled him under them, threw my boots across the room, and succumbed.

"I love you," Ned said as we were falling asleep.

"Shut up," I said, unsentimentally, and stole back my half of the covers.

*

Chasing sheep can be fun, if done right. I stood up for a moment, belted out an up-tempo verse of "Good King Wenceslas", and watched as the elderly ewe turned away from the steeper side of the hill and towards its cheerfully munching compatriots. The shepherds were about five hundred metres in that direction; Ned and I were posing as roving travellers eager to do a night's labour in exchange for food. Not the best ruse in the world, but after three weeks I was running out of creativity, and also of Aramaic; we had learned how to say "I mean you no harm" and "May I have some food, please?" and "The pen of my aunt is on the table", which quite limited my capacity for scintillating conversation. Ovine intruders dealt with, I went back to stargazing.

Living in Oxford in the twenty-first century, one is very familiar with the spires and spikes of the cityscape. As an undergraduate I spent more than one night on the roof of Lincoln, chasing my gentleman friend of the time -- a melancholy theologian whose idea of romance was midnight pontification on Nietzsche; he grew up to be a accountant in the City, bless the man -- and more than that, one is familiar with the shape of the sky, the presences and absences of things. Even after so much time on this self-same hillside, I hadn't got used to the sheer quantity of starlight. Without Oxford's turrets and light pollution, there was nothing to obliterate the great sweep of the constellations. That, at least, had been worth seeing -- the Milky Way in glittering smudges across the black, untouched by obscuring modernity -- even if nothing else on this godforsaken project was going right.

"Verity?"

"Mmm?" I sat up, to find Ned rummaging in his kit bag for a torch. "What is it?"

"I'm going down for bit of a reconnoitre. Back in a minute."

"Sure," I said, lazily, and watched his shadow disappear below me. He looked better, I decided; sleeping the clock round had done him a great deal of good, like it had me. I had blurry recollections of the cat having come in and sat on my head round about midday, and Ned having a small shouting match with her in the hall at four in the afternoon, but we had lain largely undisturbed until eight o'clock the next morning, following which we had a very good if somewhat eclectic breakfast, and returned to Balliol almost refreshed. 

I was still lying there, pondering such weighty matters as my morning's post (a bank statement, an alumni newsletter, an invitation to the Arnold and Brackenbury's annual carol-singing) and whether the cat had learned to open the kitchen door yet, when Ned came running up the hill, out of breath, yelling, "Verity! There's a -- oh, dear, there's a. A problem. Danish."

I was thinking about time-lag, and whether he was being chased by an oversized pastry, when a six-foot-tall blonde man with very blue eyes stepped out of the dark and said, "Greetings. I am Lars." 

"Oh," I said. 

"You are Verity Kindle," said Lars.

"Oh," I said, again. "Er. Who are you?"

"Lars Pettersen. And I am not Danish. I am Swedish. But I am a researcher from the University of Copenhagen."

Later in our acquaintance, I came to get accustomed to Lars' habit of speaking in definitive declaratives; at that point, sitting on the hill in the dim light, it was somewhat disconcerting, and for a moment, the world spun around my head. "Um, Mr. Pettersen, I'm very pleased to meet you, but...."

"What are you doing here?" Ned supplied at this point. "And when I say here, I don't mean this patch of grass in particular but first-century Palestine in general."

I was starting to feel rather dizzy; it seemed as though Ned was talking through water, or thick treacle.

"I come in search of data. Your research has become famous. Our budget for the year is, er" -- for the first time he seemed to hesitate -- "understretched. We wished a project of good provenance. Yours was our first choice."

"So, wait," I said, through the general blur. "You're another research team? Not from Oxford?"

"Apparently there are other places," said Ned, a little sardonically. "Is there anyone else out here that we should know about?"

"There may be others, I believe," Lars said, and I was too busy marvelling at his comma to notice the ground coming up to meet me very fast. It's one of those strange things; you're only dimly aware of the impending event as it gets ever more impending, but when it happens it seems like you knew all along. Impending events that are not mysterious Swedes, I mean. 

Anyway, when I came around, I wondered if it had been some sort of bizarre dream; I was alone on the hillside, save for Ned, who reached out and touched my cheek, pushing a curl of hair behind my ear. "Hello, there," he said, softly. "Back?"

I shook my head to clear it, and felt the world come back into focus. The stars were bright and brilliant, and oddly soothing in their patterns around my head. "I think so. Leftover symptom of time-lag, do you think?"

"I'm not sure," he said, sounding worried. "Is that normal? Don't you normally, I don't know, start eating weird food combinations?"

"Breakfast was porridge oats and green olives," I reminded him, quietly, and leaned back against his shoulder. "Er... Ned. Before I... disappeared, there was a, well, there was a person."

"Lars," said Ned, cheerfully. "He was very helpful. He got me this" -- this turned out to be a hipflask of brandy, and I took a warming swig -- "and he just went down to the town to see if he could get us more blankets."

"Right," I said, a little more clearly, and spotted the moving figure, now nearing the bottom of the hill. "O little town," I said, dreamily, and Ned frowned.

"So, apparently we're not the only people out here," he said quickly. "There are other groups."

"Other than ours, I mean?" I said, thoughtfully. The other Oxonian pottering about the place was an undergraduate physicist on the other side of the hill, equipped with his very own fibreglass sheep stuffed full of miniature spectrometers and spare refractor lenses. I had no idea if he understood the significance of his place in space and time, or if it was just an elaborate way of getting some work done. I suspected the latter; at any rate, he was being kept happy by an endless supply of squared paper and cherry-flavoured Pop Tarts. I'd given up enquiring.

"Other than ours, and other than Lars and his partner."

"His partner?"

"A five-foot Dane called Ingeborg. Don't ask. They've been in the town all this time, which is why we've never run into each other before. He says he saw the first research terms the week before the census began. Oh, and there's also a roving team of Japanese researchers in big hats." 

"No wonder there's no room at the inn."

Ned laughed, then looked thoughtful. I was feeling fuzzy again, and leaned against him, letting the stars fall out of focus so my eyes were full of light. "Don't feel so good, you know."

"Sleep," he said, and I did, only waking for a moment a while later when Ned tucked the new blankets around me. They were more anachronistic than ours, but by that point I was willing to sell my immortal soul for a fleece lining, and we snuggled up together under the revolving elliptic.

*

To put it briefly, the exclusion zone is pretty enormous. They were proposing the first papers on it when I was writing my doctoral thesis, and by the time I was defending, the closest teams had got to approximately a fortnight on either side. (No wonder the Bethlehem census never tallied; half the people in town at the time were befuddled Oxford historians trying to choke down stoneground flatbread and look like they liked it.) But try and get any closer, and there were people finding themselves in twentieth-century marrow fields and the hanging gardens of Babylon. A week after my viva, when I was just about sober again, the university announced they'd run out of money. Cue the intervention of the Church of England and the British Humanist Association, and suddenly Ned and I were postdocs. 

So that made a lot of sense, and it even made a certain amount of sense that there were declarative Scandinavians and sugar-junkie physicists running around, and I could even find it within myself to understand the small details, the rough clothes and bedding, the small camp we had made for ourselves above the lights of the town. But it made less sense when I curled up in and around Ned's body, the warmth punctuated by the moving chill of his toes, and hid from the shepherds, and looked up at the sky, and waited for the angels.

It was easier, I think, for Ned. He spent a lot of time around Lady Schrapnell at a formative age and is consequently an atheist. And as for the scientists over the hill, I doubt they even realised the possibility. But at five o'clock in the morning, just when I was beginning to be aware of the distant murmurs and bleats of the sheep, the quiet pinks and purples of the east, it seemed natural to just say, "Do you think...?" and leave it to hang, bell-like, on the stillness of the air.

Ned took a long time before answering. "I don't think," he said, at last. "I try not to, at least."

"You're an academic," I pointed out, my head buried somewhere near his left armpit. "That would seem unlikely."

"There's thinking and there's thinking." He paused. "Maybe I think and I don't believe."

"That's not true, either," I said. "Of course you believe. I know you. You believe in, in _things_."

He laughed, and I felt it rather than hearing it. "I'm not a Berkelian idealist, if that's what you mean."

"That's not what I meant," I said, and smiled. "Maybe _I_ am. Maybe we're figments in the mind of God."

"Maybe not. Maybe we are all that there is. We're not made in the image of anything but ourselves." He was breathing deeply, slowly, gathering words. "Of course I believe in things. I believe in history, I believe in the power of knowledge, I believe in properly referencing your work. I believe in truth and beauty and summer afternoons on the Isis with you. Will that do?"

"Shut up," I said into his neck, and he chuckled. 

We dozed off again before the dawn had quite broken. I was having a strange half-dream about locusts and brimstone when suddenly there was shouting, there was cold air, it was harsh and it was violent and I was rolling off Ned onto the hard ground and there was an intruder. At first I thought it was Lars or the mysterious Ingeborg, but when I'd sat up and wiped my eyes, it was Cornell, the physicist from over the hill. He looked dishevelled, out of breath, and something else as well, and while Ned brushed himself off, I realised it was something like fear.

"Sorry to disturb," he said, suddenly all clipped English precision. "But I thought you might want to know."

"What?" Ned asked, gently.

Cornell sat down roughly and raised an arm to point at the horizon. "That," he said. "That, you see it?"

I followed his gaze, took in the brightest star in the bruising sky, and understood.

"It wasn't there yesterday," he said, and fell backwards onto the grass. 

*

Lars took it all philosophically. "It may be a comet. I myself suspected divine revelation on my first sight of Halley's Comet."

"Christ," Cornell said. "It's not a comet. Jesus _haploid_ Christ on a fucking _bicycle_ , it's not a comet."

Lars looked politely intrigued by the sudden lapse; a sheep that had been heading in our general direction abruptly decided discretion was the better part of valour. Taking Ned's arm and leading him off to a slightly safer distance, I stared at the star for a moment, and then at him, and then raised my eyebrows.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know! I don't even know what I don't know. I suppose" -- and he was raising his voice so the others could hear -- "we could go down to the town to investigate? I mean, I know no one got close to the stable before, but." He shrugged.

"Ingeborg is in the town already," Lars answered. "There seems to be no increase in activity as far as we are aware."

"Look, it could be a coincidence, right?" I said. "A star going nova -- that happens, doesn't it?"

"Here?" Cornell asked. "Now?"

No one had anything to say for a minute. At length, I turned around and watched the disc of the sun break free of the horizon. The star was still visible; dimmer, but an appreciable point. "Let's go," Ned said, heavily. "Exclusion zone or not, we've got to."

"Ingeborg will be worried," Lars said. "And there is another research group whom I believe ought to be informed."

"Wait," I said. "You go -- I ought to check in. They ought to know what's going on back in Oxford." 

Ned nodded. "Right. Cornell can come with me, you go back." 

I gave him a quick kiss, and they were on their way. The net was set to open and close every ten minutes, and just as they were quite out of sight, the disorientation set in; within a few seconds of subjective time, I was in the lab, and Warder was peering at me in a baleful sort of a way. "All there?" she inquired, acidly. "Got all your arms and legs?"

I didn't bother to inspect them. "Listen, Warder, I haven't got much time, I've got to talk to someone from Time Travel and then I've got to go back, where is everyone?"

She didn't seem to be listening, pressing buttons on the console. Something made a loud error noise, and she hissed. "No one's going anywhere in a hurry, not with this lot in this state. Why nothing in this bloody simulation ever does what it's supposed to, I don't know."

"But..." I began.

"You've got all the time in the world, love! It's _time travel_ , remember? Go and have some tea or something."

 _And stop bothering me_ , said the subtext, and I shook some of the dust off myself. And resolved to make the best of it, and went to find some clothes that weren't made of sackcloth, and to fetch some tea from the buttery. 

For once, it was open. "Verity!" said Mr. Dunworthy, cheerfully. "What brings you to this fair century? Jim" -- this to the grim buttery server -- "another cup, please. Now, I know you're a tea drinker, but your expression suggests it's an occasion for good coffee."

I said, "We've seen the star."

He didn't miss a beat. "Jim, could you add a shot of rum to both of those, please? Thank you. Now. Let's go for a walk in the quad, shall we?" 

Outside, it was freezing cold. I warmed my hands on the mug, and then my insides on the rum. Mr. Dunworthy gave me a long glance as I gulped it down, and sighed. "Well. The star."

"Yes," I said, echoing the sigh. "Cornell is absolutely sure it's not a comet, it seems, despite what the physicists were saying."

"They were somewhat single-minded, weren't they. That said, I do suspect we're not the only ones with funding from the humanists. It's all going to be terribly embarrassing."

"I don't know what to do," I said, honestly. "This means we've got closer than anyone else has -- I mean, there were other historians sent during the time of the census, but no one else reported a star. You can see it during the daytime, too," I added, and felt ridiculously stupid all of a sudden. We were walking away from the buildings of the college, towards the Fellows' Garden, but from behind me I could still hear the faint sounds of Warder swearing. More console trouble, I supposed.

"And I don't know what to advise," he answered, with echoes of my honesty. "I don't. My instinct is to pull you all out at once. Another instinct is to go through with you myself and stay just as long as we possibly can. You see the trouble in giving advice."

I smiled. "Just to make things more complicated, there's also two other research teams fluttering about. Tell me something -- when is Halley's Comet expected to return?"

"Halley's Comet?" He looked a little surprised. "Not for three or four years, yet. 2061, that sounds right; I believe the Royal Observatory has already begun to sell tickets."

"I thought so." I sighed. "Well, at least one of the other research teams is from our subjective future and seems to be there just to check our research. And there's apparently another one, from Japan, but I haven't met them."

"Presumably they have more difficulty interacting with contemporaries," he said, and I smiled a little; he was, as always, calming. 

"Why were you in the buttery?" I asked, suddenly wanting to bring the conversation back to Oxford, back to quiet winter mundanities.

"Hiding from the SCR," he said frankly. "Surely you've noticed it's interview season?"

I hadn't, but suddenly the occasional scared-looking seventeen-year-old wandering the quad made sense. "Good to know, isn't it," I said, "that there are people in the vicinity having worse days than us?"

He chucked, tolerantly. "Well, here's my advice. Go right in there and be yourself."

"That's interview advice."

"And it works in this instance, too. The net is self-correcting, that's one thing we learned from all that mess last year. Go in there, be yourself in space and time, and we'll see."

I laughed. "Thank you for the coffee."

"You're welcome. Good luck."

I paused to wave at him before I returned my mug, retrieved my clothes and presented myself to Warder, who favoured me with grumpiness. "It's playing up," she warned me. "I almost lost the lock a couple of times."

"Can I go back now?"

"Verity." She looked at me, suddenly more serious than cranky. "I mean it. It's not going to open every ten minutes, you understand? Something's stopping it locking properly. When you get in, warn the others, okay? And when I can bring you back, I'll go ahead and I'll do it, no questions asked. Got it?"

"Got it."

And then I was back there, not right where I'd left but on the very edge of that little town of Bethlehem, and I had a brief glimpse of stars and sheep and dust when something very heavy landed on me, and then I couldn't breathe.

*

"Ned!" I yelled, through the embrace. "Ned, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

He ignored me, kissed my hair, and finally held me at arm's length. "Welcome back," he said quietly.

"I've only been gone half an hour! What have you done to your _face_?"

He looked sheepish, stroking his chin. "Funny, what three weeks without a razor will do to you."

"We were in Oxford two days ago," I said.

"No, we weren't." Ned smiled wryly. "Half an hour, did you say? We've been here three weeks. I was starting to worry the net would never open and I'd never see you again."

I kissed him again, because he seemed to need it. "I told Mr. Dunworthy about the star."

"It's still there," he said, pointing at it with a certain weariness. "And nothing at all has happened since you've been gone. This is Ingeborg, by the way."

"Hi," said Ingeborg. He reminded me in some small way of Hercule Poirot, only with more hair. "It's good to meet you at last. I've heard a lot about you."

Off my look, Ned said, "We've had a lot of time for conversation."

"I don't want to confess ignorance here," I said, after a moment, "but is Ingeborg not usually a name given to girls?"

"His name is Olaf," Lars put in at this point. "You will call him Ingeborg."

Ned shrugged -- apparently they hadn't had quite _that_ much time for conversation -- and took my arm. "Gentlemen," he said, "I shall see you anon."

They nodded, and headed in the other direction; I supposed, although I hadn't thought of it until just then, that their own net must open somewhere fairly distant from ours, as it would have been tempting the fates of confusion to put them anywhere close together.

"What happened?" Ned asked me, as we walked down the dusty road. The small houses weren't empty -- I saw flickering lanterns and oil lamps -- but the streets weren't crowded. We talked softly, as to not let the language we used contaminate the time.

"Just what I said," I told him. "I told them about the star. And Warder thinks the net is playing up -- at any rate, she's having trouble getting people in and out."

"Verity, it really is good to see you." Ned looked at me with a small smile. "It was just... God, it was so dispiriting. We were stuck here, no way out. Lars and Ingeborg even offered to try and take me into my subjective future -- they're from our future, did you know that?"

"I figured it out," I said, grinning.

"Yes, anyway, so they tried, even though I don't think anyone's ever done it without being turned into baked beans. But it turned out they couldn't get out either. I guess they're going to see if they can, now."

I nodded. "I don't understand it. From my end it didn't seem so bad, but I think maybe it's something about the exclusion zone? People were hitting it and ending up in eighteenth-century Sicily and all manner of things. And that was even before the star, we've got closer than anyone else ever has."

It's funny, isn't it, how saying a thing makes it suddenly clear in your head? For me it was like waves breaking -- suddenly, violently -- and then I was yelling at Ned in a way I'd never yelled at him, "The shepherds, where are the shepherds?"

"They're where they always are," he said, confused, and I knew that wasn't right, and suddenly I started to run. All the blood in my body was flooding through my ears, the skin of my feet was cracking and breaking on leather, and I was probably running faster than I'd ever run in my life and there was Ned, keeping up, pace for pace.

"We have to get out!" I yelled, even as we were thudding through to the edge of the town and away and up, up the craggy edges of the hillside and up to the greener grass at the top, and then we were there, in that place where we'd seen so many days, and there was nothing. No animal sounds, no birdcalls. Through the desperate, desolate silence, I heard a voice: a shepherd, a man with nothing but the bits of wood and scraps of cloth of his trade and the flesh and blood of his body, calling into the dark, full of fear, full of hope, full of the glory of whatever it is that makes a human stand on the edge of all they've ever known and shout their passion into the beyond.

I heard Ned swear, then cry out. And I could see my hair was lit from behind, and the eyes were showing in the man's face, bright, and then there came the rising choruses, the unearthly voices, and the heavy smash of the ground against my head.

The next thing I heard was: "Three pounds it is, on battels."

"Ned," I said. "Ned!"

"He's right there," said the same voice; I realised, through enormous swirls of confusion, that it was Warder. "What do you two do out there, I'd like to know? More than what we do in here, what with the wine cellar being next door. Three pounds on battels and it's all the mulled wine they can drink, no wonder they get raucous on the Latin ones."

"What?" came Ned's voice, and something inside me exploded in relief. "What do you mean? What happened?"

"Ned, do you need a hanky or something? It's the Nepotists. You got an invite, didn't you? Everyone gets an invite, it's the bloody Arnold and Brackenbury whatsits. Anyway! We got you back, didn't we? What's all the panic about?"

"You got us back," I said. "You got us back?"

"Just one chance, we had," Warder said. "One night only, if you will. And I got you locked on and out, not that I expected either of you to be happy about it, but still."

She seemed to disappear for a moment -- maybe for the hanky, I didn't know, I couldn't quite see through the light hurting my eyes. Ned picked me up -- sort of; it was unwieldy, ungainly, the whole thing was a mess -- and I rubbed my eyes against the light of the buttery and then he managed to get me out of the lab before I quite burst into tears. I was following him, he was pulling me by the hand, and then we were in Balliol's garden quad, stripped of its beauty by winter, made harsh and eerie by the Narnian lanterns.

"Come on," he whispered, and we clambered up the stairs to the hall and stopped halfway, looking out over the college. From behind us, I could hear singing, not tuneful, but passionate: the carollers had reached their last few carols, raising the roof with "Adeste Fideles".

" _Venite, venite in Bethlehem_ ," Ned murmured, beside me. "Well, we did." He sounded an awful lot like he was trying not to cry. "You're not supposed to _know_ , you're not supposed to, it's an article of faith."

"You're not supposed to know!" I repeated. "But we were! We're historians! I mean, we were right at the edge of the exclusion zone. We saw... something. Something we're to be excluded from. Something, maybe, we're not to touch."

"We don't know," Ned said, suddenly. "We heard the Nepotists through the net, didn't we? That's what we heard? And we saw the light from the lab coming through?"

I didn't say anything, then. It's strange, isn't it? How love can strip away all your kindness, how you don't make it easier, you don't lie when you don't know the truth, and you sit out there in the cold with your hands locked together and you don't let go. Even when we saw Cornell emerge from the buttery, looking unkempt and frightened, we didn't move; he ran out towards the front quad, perhaps to the concrete embrace of the university science area, but I hoped not. He should go home, sometimes the night's over and it's time to go home.

We stayed there as the chapel bells rang the hours, even when we were shivering, watching clouds of breath steam in the lantern light, until the undergraduates threw open the doors and sang out Jerusalem to the stars.

*

Penwiper had grown. Watching her stalk about, not remotely kittenish, I felt rather bereft -- until she dived headfirst into a bowl of milk, padded through into our room and leapt lovingly onto my lap. "Hello, baby cat," I murmured, gently pulling at her ears. "Aren't you lovely? Yes, you are."

"Talking to the cat again?" Ned asked, coming through with water glistening off the tips of his hair. He had shaved, finally; the sight of him as I'd known him before the post-doctoral adventure had begun was both refreshing and strange. "You know what happens to women who talk to cats."

"I have no idea," I said, lazily, stroking Penwiper's fur the wrong way just to annoy her. She gave me a glare, and I hurriedly smoothed her down again.

"They develop strange neuroses and become social maladepts. It's quite a staple of late-twentieth-century literature." He looked proud of himself and started to unlace his boots; the cat immediately jumped down to assist in the matter.

"Are you coming to bed, then?" I asked. "I don't know about you, but I think I want to stay in bed for the rest of my life. In fact, I'm going to marry my bed instead of you." 

Ned laughed. "I think you may have a point there. Get off, you bloody cat." He shook her away, dropped the boots and clambered under the covers. "You know, we ought to invite Lars and Ingeborg to our wedding."

"We don't have an address for them, do we?" I thought about it. "I suppose ÔLars the Terribly Stoic, University of Copenhagen' would do it. But, wait, Ned -- they don't know who we are yet!"

"Ah, but." Ned looked pleased with himself. "They were at our wedding. Lars told me all about your dress."

"He told you about my dress?" I was outraged. "My _dress_? Bastard."

"I'll try and forget. Tell him about Ingeborg's tux when they get married."

"How'd you know they'll get married?"

Ned laughed. "The Japanese group leader was there. His name's Hiroshi, he said the canapes were very good."

"That is good to know," I said, snuggling down. "We should have canapes. With little sundried tomatoes on, I like those."

Ned laughed, softly. "Where do you want to get married?"

"Not on a hill!" I was getting sleepier. "Definitely not on a hill."

"Oxford _is_ blessedly flat. How about a garden?"

"Balliol's front quad," I said, laughing back at him. "It's very pretty, and we can say our vows in and around the porters shouting at us."

A pause, and then he said, "Balliol's chapel. It's pretty, too. We could get married there, if you want."

"It's beautiful," I said, slowly. "Maybe." 

"Maybe," he echoed. 

There was a brief pause, and I thought about that, about Balliol and its stained glass, its timeless ugliness, its perennial flowers.

"But now," Ned said, in the voice of one announcing the lion-tamer, "sleep! Shall I draw the curtains?"

"Don't," I said, with a quick glance at the morning beyond the window. "I don't want it to be dark."

"It isn't," he said.

"I love you," I said -- and then there was nothing left but ourselves, curled together in the white daylight, and the space of the world that was ours. 

 


End file.
